Lifeclinic

By David Mendosa

Lifeclinic's
Diabetes Channel
is just about the easiest Web site that I've had the
pleasure of writing about. The site is clear and straightforward, bright and
attractively presented.

It's not that the information presented here is oversimplified. There's a lot
of it, and it's well organized.

It’s like the ballplayer who makes an apparently effortless catch…

The Lifeclinic site as a whole has
been on-line since December 1999, starting with a Blood Pressure Channel. Its
Diabetes Channel has been up only since last December. Some promising parts of
the Diabetes Channel, like parts of the resource locator, need time to be
fleshed out, but what the company has done so far is outstanding.

The company behind the site is Spacelabs
Medical Inc. of Redmond, Washington. A big part of my pleasure in
researching and writing about this site was talking with Karyn Beckley, vice
president of Spacelabs' Corporate Administrative Services. Karyn, who spends
about 60 percent of her time on Lifeclinic, told me just what I needed to know
when I called.

Spacelabs is big in monitoring. It started 42 years ago with a grant from the
U.S. Air Force to figure out how to monitor astronauts in space. That was even
before the birth of NASA.

"The first signal that came back from the moon," Karyn says,
"was a heartbeat that came back on a Spacelabs monitor." And now, she
says, the company is one of the world's largest providers of patient monitoring
in hospitals, especially blood pressure monitoring.

So it's not surprising that blood glucose monitoring is part of Lifeclinic's
Diabetes Channel. Once you log on as a member, you can upload your numbers
manually. Or if you have a Bayer Glucometer Elite XL or LifeScan One Touch meter
and connecting cable, you can upload them automatically. You can also track your
blood pressure, pulse, weight, and cholesterol on the site.

When I talked with Karyn, they had just added three new features. The
resource locator includes a diabetes expert locator (physicians, nurses, etc.)
searchable by country, state, or city. You can search associations, education
programs, financial assistance, government programs, research, support groups,
and treatment centers by state.

The other new features are a diabetic supply guide and a diabetes and
pregnancy section. Karyn says that while the foot clinic is now the most visited
part of the site, she expects that the three new areas will be popular ones too.

The only thing I didn't like was the use of animated GIFs—flashing
pictures—in the site's on-line advertisements. But fortunately you can stop
them from moving and distracting you by hitting the <Esc> key.

One of the site's best features is "Ask the Doctor." The doctor in
question is David McCulloch, M.D., a practicing diabetologist at Group Health
Cooperative of Puget Sound and a member Lifeclinic diabetes clinical advisory
board. Here you can ask him things that you don't have time to talk with your
own doctor about or get a second opinion.

Everything about the Lifeclinic site is geared toward making it easy for you
to use. Like the ballplayer who makes an apparently effortless catch, the site's
ease of use is a sign of its professionalism.

The American Diabetes Association originally published this article on its Web site as one of my “About the Internet” columns.